《While The Light Lasts》.doc

While The Light Lasts Agatha Christie THE HOUSE OF DREAMS This is the story of John Segrave - of his life, which was unsatisfactory; of his love, which was unsatisfied; of his dreams, and of his death; and if in the two latter he found what was denied in the two former, then his life may, after all, be taken as a success. Who knows? John Segrave came of a family which had been slowly going down the hill for the last century. They had been landowners since the days of Elizabeth, but their last piece of property was sold. It was thought well that one of the sons at least should acquire the useful art of money-making. It was an unconscious irony of Fate that John should be the one chosen. With his strangely sensitive mouth, and the long dark blue slits of eyes that suggested an elf or a faun, something wild and of the woods, it was incongruous that he should be offered up, a sacrifice on the altar of Finance. The smell of the earth, the taste of the sea salt on ones lips, and the free sky above ones head - these were the things beloved by John Segrave, to which he was to bid farewell. At the age of eighteen he became a junior clerk in a big business house. Seven years later he was still a clerk, not quite so junior, but with status otherwise unchanged. The faculty for getting on in the world had been omitted from his makeup. He was punctual, industrious, plodding - a clerk and nothing but a clerk. And yet he might have been - what? He could hardly answer that question himself, but he could not rid himself of the conviction that somewhere there was a life in which he could have - counted. There was power in him, swiftness of vision, a something of which his fellow toilers had never had a glimpse. They liked him. He was popular because of his air of careless friendship, and they never appreciated the fact that he barred them out by that same manner from any real intimacy. The dream came to him suddenly. It was no childish fantasy growing and developing through the years